1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, method, and storage medium having stored therein a program, more particularly to a technology that enables a user to realize an operation equivalent to a mouse operation simply by moving the eye in a state in which the head is not being constrained.
2. Related Art
Conventionally, as an operation of inputting information to an information processing apparatus such as a personal computer, an input operation using an input device is employed. Especially, an input operation using a mouse, i.e., a so-called mouse operation is widely employed as the input operation using an input device. As an exemplary mouse operation, there is known an operation of moving a mouse pointer to an icon or the like, and clicking the icon or the like to select it.
Recently, there is a demand for allowing a user watching a screen including a mouse pointer to realize an input operation (hereinafter, referred to as a “mouse equivalent operation”) equivalent to the mouse operation, by simply moving his or her eye, without using a mouse. In order to meet such a demand, for example, technologies for detecting a position of a line of sight (hereinafter, referred to as “gaze position”) of a human eye are developed and disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 1997-18760, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-61785, and Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 1994-347866.
However, in the technologies disclosed by the aforementioned publications, it is premised that the user's head is constrained in some way, such that the user looks into a finder while his head is fixed, or the user wears a head mount display on the head.
Since it is unpleasant for a user to have his or her head constrained only for the purpose of the mouse equivalent operation, it is desired to realize the mouse equivalent operation without having the head of the user constrained.
The present invention is conceived in view of the above-described circumstances, and it is an object of the present invention to enable a user to realize the mouse equivalent operation simply by moving the eye in a state in which the head is not being constrained.